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This article is about a musical genre.For other
uses, see Industrial
.

Industrial music is an experimental music style, often including
electronic music, that draws on
transgressive and provocative themes. The premise behind creation
of industrial music was to "pursue music in the context of the late
industrial society, a dehumanized world increasingly alienated from
nature", focusing on "issues of the modern age, where propaganda
and the access and control of information were becoming the primary
tools of power." The initial idea for music that reflects sounds
from the industrial age came from the composers and musicians Erik
Satie and John Cage. The term "industrial music" was coined in the
mid-1970s to describe Industrial
Records artists. The Allmusic website
defines industrial music as the "most abrasive and aggressive
fusion of rock and electronic music";
"initially a blend of avant-garde electronics experiments (tape
music, musique concrète, white
noise, synthesizers, sequencers, etc.) and punk provocation".

The first industrial artists experimented with noise and
controversial topics. Their production was not limited to music,
but included mail art, performance art, installation pieces and other art forms.
Prominent industrial musicians include Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Boyd Rice, Cabaret Voltaire, and Z'EV. While the term was initially self-applied by a
small coterie of groups and individuals associated with Industrial
Records, it broadened to include artists influenced by the original
movement or using an "industrial" aesthetic. While industrial music
was born in the mid-1970s, it was not noticed by mainstream
listeners until the 1980s and 1990s, when it began to evolve into
more mainstream, acceptable forms.

Characteristics

Early industrial music often featured tape editing, stark
percussion and loops distorted to the point where they had degraded
to harsh noise. Vocals were sporadic, and were as likely to be
bubblegum pop as they were to be
abrasive polemics. Early industrial performances often involved taboo-breaking, provocative elements, such as mutilation, sado-masochistic elements and totalitarian imagery or symbolism, as well as
forms of audience abuse. The purpose of industrial music initially
was to serve as a commentary on modern society by eschewing what
artists saw as trite connections to the past. Industrial music is
commonly built around non-musical and often distorted, repetitive,
percussive sounds of industrial machinery, reflecting feelings of
alienation and dehumanization as a form of social critique. The
typical themes of industrial music include decay, decomposition,
disorders, helplessness, horror, irresolution, madness, paranoia,
persecution, secrecy, unease and terror. Listener responses were
sad, dark, anxious, futuristic, death, urban, violent and
anguish.

William S.

Burroughs, a conceptual inspiration for the industrial
musicians.

Journalist Simon Reynolds described
the early industrial group Cabaret Voltaire as characterized by
"hissing high hats and squelchy snares of rhythm-generator." He
enumerated the members' individual contributions as "[Chris] Watson's smears of synth
slime; [Stephen] Mallinder's
dankly pulsing bass; and [Richard H.]
Kirk's spikes of shattered-glass guitar." Watson custom-built a
fuzzbox for Kirk's guitar, producing a unique timbre. Mallinder's vocals were also electronically
treated. Chris Carter built
speakers, effects units, and synthesizer modules, as well as
modifying more conventional rock instrumentation, for Throbbing
Gristle. He also invented a device named the "Gristle-izer", played
by Peter Christopherson, which
comprised a one-octave keyboard and a number of cassette machines
triggering various pre-recorded sounds. Throbbing Gristle opposed
the elements of traditional rock music remaining in the punk rock scene, declaring industrial to be
"anti-music." Accordingly, Throbbing Gristle did not seek to build
upon a pre-existing genre, but instead "their mythos rests on the
claim that they are the founding creators of an entirely new genre,
'industrial music.'" The band wrote music about unusual as well as
mundane topics, including seduction, suicide, boredom, magic,
stripping, rhetoric, plants, disco, pornography, calligraphy,
dactylomancy, politics, their dog, underwear, and more. Cosey Fanni Tutti played guitar with a
slide in order to produce glissandi, or
pounded the strings as if it were a percussion instrument.
Throbbing Gristle also played at very high volume and produced
ultra-high and sub-bass frequencies in an attempt to produce
physical effects, naming this approach as "metabolic music." They
also aimed high powered lights at the audience. Some later
Throbbing Gristle pieces, such as "United", were a much more
dance-friendly form of electropop. Some
industrial groups after Throbbing Gristle borrowed from Eurodisco or marching rhythms. Clock DVA and 23
Skidoo practiced an industrial version of funk music.

The Industrial aesthetic was heavily influenced by Dadaism, an
anti-war art movement which criticized societal norms by creating
art with an anti-art message. Dadaist art made use of "found
objects", mundane objects which were not artistic, being put into
an artistic piece - in their case for the purpose of subverting art
norms. In the same way, early Industrial music made heavy use of
"found sounds", non-musical sounds which were put into their songs.
Other early industrial artists create music by using instruments
that were recycled, stolen or discarded—at the time of the birth of
the industrial genre in the late 1970s, these instruments were
sometimes held by artists and fans to represent anti consumerist
technology, requiring no expenditure of capital, opening up the
possibility of music making to all. Voice distortion control
devices such as the Vocoder are heavily employed by industrial
musicians and speak to the integration of man with machine. Robot
voices representing alienation are also quite common in industrial
music.

Another influence on the Industrial aesthetic was Lou Reed's Metal
Machine Music. Pitchfork Music cites this album as "inspiring, in
part, much of the contemporary avant-garde music scene-- noise, in
particular." The album consists entirely of guitar feedback,
anticipating Industrial's use of non-musical sounds.

Industrial Records

Industrial Music for Industrial
People was originally coined by Monte
Cazazza as the strapline for the record label Industrial Records, founded by British
art-provocateurs Throbbing
Gristle. The first wave of this music appeared with Throbbing
Gristle, from London; Cabaret Voltaire, from Sheffield; and Boyd
Rice (recording under the name NON), from the United States.
Throbbing Gristle first performed in 1976, and began as the musical
offshoot of COUM Transmissions.
COUM was initially a psychedelic rock group, but began to describe
their work as performance art in
order to obtain grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Throbbing Gristle was one of the first bands to use sampling from
prerecorded tapes, and also used a lot of homemade electronics
through which they ran their samples and instruments, for example
the loop playback machine and more famously, the Gristleizer. COUM
was composed of Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Beginning
in 1972, COUM staged several performances inspired by Fluxus and Viennese
Actionism. These included various acts of sexual and physical
abjection. Peter Christopherson, an employee of commercial artists
Hipgnosis, joined the group in 1974, with
Chris Carter joining the following year.

The group renamed itself Throbbing Gristle in September 1975, their
name coming from a northern English slang word for an erection.
Throbbing Gristle's first public performance, in October 1976, was
alongside an exhibit titled Prostitution, which included
pornographic photos of Tutti as well as used tampons. A member of
the British Parliament reacted to this first performance with
outrage, calling Throbbing Gristle "The Wreckers of Civilization."
Nicholas Fairbairn, a
Conservative politician, declared that "public money is being
wasted here to destroy the morality of our society" and blasted the
group as "wreckers of civilization" The group ended in 1981, with
P-Orridge declaring "the mission is terminated." The group reformed
in 2004.

Industrial Records intended the term industrial to evoke
the idea of music created for a new generation, with previous music
being more "agricultural":

The acts on Industrial Records were groups who "combined an interest in transgressive culture with an interest in the potential of noise as music."

Expansion of the scene

Bands like Clock DVA, Nocturnal Emissions, Whitehouse, Nurse with Wound, and SPK soon followed. Whitehouse intended to play
"the most brutal and extreme music of all time", a style they
eventually called power
electronics. An early collaborator with Whitehouse, Steve
Stapleton, formed Nurse with Wound, who experimented with noise
sculpture and sound collage. Clock DVA described their goal as
borrowing equally from surrealismautomatism and "nervous energy sort of
funk stuff, body music that flinches you and makes you move." 23
Skidoo, like Clock DVA, merged industrial music with
African-American dance music, but also performed a response to
world music. Performing at the first
WOMAD Festival in 1982, the group
likened themselves to Indonesian gamelan.
Swedish act Leather Nun, were signed to
Industrial Records in 1978, being the first non-TG/Cazazza act to
have an IR-release. Their singles eventually received significant
airplay in the United States on college
radio. It is a transgressive culture with an interest in the
potential of noise as music. Unlike other forms of popular music,
industrial music was and remain critical of systems of power and
control and this criticism clearly extends to the record
industry.

Across the Atlantic, similar experiments were taking place.
In
San
Francisco, performance artistMonte Cazazza began recording noise music.Boyd
Rice released several albums of noise, with guitar drones and
tape loops creating a cacophony of repetitive sounds. In Italy,
work by Maurizio Bianchi at the
beginning of the 1980s also shared this aesthetic. In Germany,
Einstürzende Neubauten
mixed metal percussion, guitars and unconventional instruments
(such as jackhammers and bones) in stage
performances that often damaged the venues in which they played.
Blixa Bargeld, inspired by Antonin
Artaud and an enthusiast of amphetamines, also originated an art movement
called Die Genialen Dilettanten. Bargeld is particularly well-known
for his hissing scream. In January 1984, Einstürzende Neubauten
performed a Concerto for Voice and Machinery at the
Institute of
Contemporary Arts (the same site as COUM's Prostitution
exhibition), drilling through the floor and eventually sparking a
riot. This event received front page news coverage in
England. Other groups who practiced a form of industrial "metal
music" (that is, produced by the sounds of metal crashing against
metal) include Test Dept, Laibach, and Die Krupps,
as well as Z'EV and SPK. Test Dept were largely inspired by
Russian Futurism and toured to
support the UK miners'
strike . Swans, from New York City, also
practiced a metal music aesthetic, though reliant on standard rock
instrumentation. Laibach, a Slovenian group who began while Yugoslavia remained a single state, were very
controversial for their iconographic borrowings from Stalinist, Nazi, Titoist, Dada, and Russian
Futurist imagery, conflating Yugoslav patriotism with its German
authoritarian adversary.Slavoj
Zizek has defended Laibach, arguing that they and their
associated Neue Slowenische
Kunst art group practice an overidentification with the hidden
perverse enjoyment undergirding authority that produces a
subversive and liberatory effect. Throbbing Gristle's music
continued to become more accessible, and "less chaotic" with each
release until they broke up in 1981.

Following the breakup of Throbbing Gristle, Genesis P-Orridge and
Peter Christopherson founded Psychic TV
and signed to a major label. Their first album was much more
accessible and melodic than the usual industrial style, and
included hired work by trained musicians. Later work returned to
the sound collage and noise elements of earlier industrial. They
also borrowed from funk and disco. P-Orridge
also founded Thee Temple
ov Psychick Youth, a quasi-religious organization that produced
video art. Psychic TV's commercial
aspirations were managed by Stevo of Some
Bizzare records, who released many of the later industrial
musicians, including Eistürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, and Cabaret
Voltaire. Cabaret Voltaire had become friends with New Order, and began to practice a similar form of
danceable electropop. Peter
Christopherson left Psychic TV in 1983 and formed Coil with John
Balance. Coil made use of gongs and bullroarers in an attempt
to conjur "Martian," "homosexual energy". A friend of Coil's
David Tibet, formed Current 93; both groups were inspired by amphetamines and LSD.
J.G.Thirlwell, a co-producer with Coil, developed
a version of black comedy in industrial
music, borrowing from lounge as well as
noise and film
music. In the early 1980s, the Chicago-based record label
Wax Trax! and Canada's Nettwerk helped to expand the industrial music
genre into the more accessible electro-industrial and industrial rock genres.

Industrial Music as Modernist Music

If modernism if described as a family of aesthetic practices
expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo and seeking to
imagine the world otherwise, industrial music is at home within the
scene of modernist musics. The birth of industrial music was a
response to "an age [in which] the access and control of
information were becoming the primary tools of power." At its
birth, the genre of industrial music was different than any other
music, and its use of technology and disturbing lyrics and themes
to tear apart preconceptions about the necessary rules of musical
form supports the suggestion that industrial music is modernist
music. The artists themselves made these goals explicit, even
drawing connections to social changes they wished to argue for
through their music. The Industrial Records website explains that
the musicians wanted to "re-invent Rock music with content,
motivation and risk." and that their records were " a combination
of files on our relationship with the world and a Newspaper without
censorship." They go on to say that they wanted their music to be
an awakening for listeners so that they would begin to think for
themselves and question the world around them. They probe their
listeners by saying: "You Get what you deserve. Or do you? Well,
from the people with a vested interest in controlling and guiding
society to follow their recommendations as to what attitudes you
should have, what motivations should govern your behaviour and what
goals you should be satisfied with, you DO NOT get what you
deserve. You get what you are given, and what you are given is
primarily conditioning that pushes you towards blind acceptance,
wasted labour, frustrated relationships and a vast sense of
hopelessness. We are trained to feel we are not responsible or in
control of our society and world so that we will continue to let
"Leaders" look after us like parents with retarded children."

"These ideas contributed some of the theoretical mise-en-scène
for emergent Industrial groups such as Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and
Cabaret Voltaire, all of whom experimented with cut-up sound and
re-contextualised ambient recordings." Sargeant, Jack, "The Primer:
William S. Burroughs," The Wire 300, February 2009, p.
38.

RE/Search #6/7, p. 105

Reynolds, p. 232-232.

Stubbs, David. Review of Standing in Two Circles: The
Collected Works of Boyd Rice, Brian M. Clark, ed., in The
Wire 300, February 2009, p. 72.

Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk
1978-1984. Chapters 9: "Living for the Future: Cabaret
Voltaire, The Human League and the Sheffield Scene"; 12:
"Industrial Devolution: Throbbing Gristle's Music from the Death
Factory"; and 25: "Conform to Deform: The Second-Wave Industrial
Infiltrators". London: Faber and Faber, 2005. ISBN
0-571-21569-6